Putting A New Face on Minor League Team Media (p. 1)

Putting a New Face on Your Media
Media and attendance go hand-in-hand. If you don't have a national net out, you need to get the tools to toss one.

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A Triple-A club in one of the sports that we cover declined to send press releases of their games to national media. Their reasoning? "[T]he local media does an adequate job of it."

The days of minor leagues being a local enterprise ended with the Internet. When you and your league have to contend with other forms of entertainment and more than 800 minor and indy clubs, and rising, in six sports, adequate can mean "closed."

With more than 36% of the clubs in minor league sports without any media person, and another 9% surveyed having GMs double as media people it is crucial to get a handle on your media picture. Whole department or a word processor and your flying fingers, GMs who know more about optimizing their club's "media face" can improve their bottom line in lasting and meaningful ways.

Are you doing everything that you can to use the media to put butts in seats?

That, pun intended, is the bottom line.

Whether you have dominant local market coverage, or you are struggling to get your club on the local media's radar, national media helps you, and your member clubs in the league, by connecting fans in every market to all of the players on the away as well as the home teams.

Visualize walking into a MACY*S, but instead of well merchandised packages and decadent displays, everything was sealed up in 12"x12" white boxes with no identification. How much merchandise would they sell?

Your club fills up only half of the field, court, or rink.

Who wouldn't know a talent like Michael Jordan, you might ask? Core fans, passionate about the sport would know him. They make up a small fraction of the burgeoning minor league and indy sports market though.

The major leagues have succeeded in the last three decades by squeezing every drop of image and branding out of the media. Dozens of outlets ranging from Sports Illustrated to GQ to O flood the marketplace with players' likenesses, stories of their personal lives, and their larger-than-life struggles. That level of national attention take a Jordan beyond the exceptional player that he is to being a branding icon. In major league sports, that's normal. It's expected. Joe Starter, though, on my club, is no Jordan.

The big fish of the small ponds fall into a couple of categories, but both can be leveraged to benefit from their drawing power, both at home and away.

Did you know that your away team offers you more powerful ticket sales leverage than even your home club can?

Away Players A Better Draw

Stubby Clapp may have only seen a cup of coffee or two in the big leagues with the St. Louis Cardinals, but he was a huge player for the Memphis Redbirds.

Stubby in Omaha or Albuquerque, though, would drop off the radar with all but the core fans until he had gone through a large part of the season visiting those clubs, and had a chance to shine for those crowds.

What if you could increase the expectation level of those away markets so that 500, 1,000, 2,000 more people who only come to see you a handful of times a year make their way to come see a Stubby Clapp?

Exciting visiting players are a limited commodity. They are in town for limited, fixed periods of time each season. Your home fans may think that they have all the time in the world to see Ed Smith in your uni, but, properly promoted, six chances to see Stubby might be an opportunity to drive up attendance numbers by generating enough excitement in the media to get people to check out what all of the fuss is about.

Who Do You Promote?

Record is always a good general indicator. Communication with your...

Continued...

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